Anxiety Coaching

     Before I began my schooling in Psychology there was a lot of talk about “right brained” verses “left brained” people. What happened during my time in college is that the use of MRI’s and other brain scanning techniques showed that most thought requires the use of both hemispheres of the brain. So calling someone left-brained (logical, ordered) or right brained (emotional, artistic) went out of fashion, but I think the concept still holds a lot of value, especially to someone struggling with anxiety.

What got me thinking about this was a book by Jill Bolte Taylor called “My Stroke of Insight.” The amazing thing about this book is that it was written from the first hand experiences of Jill, who had a catastrophic stoke at the age of 37. Specifically, Jill was a Neuroanatomist (Someone who teaches doctors how to understand the brain) who had a hemorrhagic stroke in a large part of the left-hemisphere of her brain. Basically her brain had an artery blow out and took half of itself offline. Two things make this story one-in-a-billion: It happened to someone who could understand and articulate what was happening as individual regions of her brain turned off. And she recovered enough to ever tell her story to anyone. Remember, language lives mostly in our left-hemisphere and that was gone within the first few minutes of her stroke. How did she remember anything without the use of language? You’ll have to read the book.

Why this story matters to me and matters to anyone who has ever struggled with anxiety is that Jill learned that without her left-brain worry was impossible. You see, your left-brain is responsible for placing things in a time continuum. It allows us to connect the past, to the present, to the future. Most of the time this is a wonderful thing. Aside from opposable thumbs this is one of humanities greatest traits. We can plan, we can look over the past to help us change how we behave in the future, and we can look into the future and imagine possible outcomes. Included in this is our ability to judge what outcomes are better or what outcomes are worse. For Jill, as hard as this is for us to imagine, in a few minutes she lost all of this and more. Because of the stroke she was eternally stuck in the present, unable even to tell where her body ended and the rest of the world began. But you know what? She was, by her own account, in a kind of nirvana or heaven. Anxiety is impossible if we are truly in the present.

For many of my clients, even if they think of themselves as emotional or artistic, logic is their tool of choice. Be it in their job, or how they are trying to deal with their own anxiety, it is all about looking for a solution, trying to figure this out. All of this is left-brained, and this may help us understand why people get stuck in a cycle of anxiety.

The cycle would look something like this: Persistent worry and anxiety (left-brain) prompts us to feel the need to remove this from our life (this is a judgment that comes from our left brain). We ponder why this is happening (left-brain), imagine what will happen if this gets worse (left-brain), research this as a disorder (left-brain), judge ourselves as weak or crazy (left-brain), wonder what others will think (left-brain), and amazingly the anxiety persists. All the while, just a few millimeters away exists the other half of our brain that cannot think in these terms. If we can learn as Jill Bolte Taylor puts it, to “step to the right”, to move into our right brain, we can find a place of perpetual peace. We all posses this and it follows us wherever we go. In time we can learn to trust that it doesn’t matter where we are, or whom we are with, peace is just a small step to the right.